High-performance businesses—the ones that consistently lead their industries over many business cycles—jump from one S-curve to another again and again. How they do that is the subject of a new book, “Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top, and Stay There,” by Paul Nunes and Tim Breene, leaders of the High Performance Business Research program at Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. The program was born in 2003 to determine exactly how some companies become high performers, through good times and bad, while others lag behind or fail.

Mr. Nunes and Mr. Breene directed the analysis of the performance of more than 800 companies around the world in dozens of sectors, most over a 10-year span. They identified key differences in the companies that successfully make the jump, versus those that peak, then stall and decline. According to Accenture’s research, high performers:

resolve the conflicting needs of today and tomorrow—trading some of today’s performance for tomorrow’s gain

build a hothouse of talent to nurture employees, which then attracts more people with skills and vision, ultimately creating a talent surplus

change top management while business is still thriving

pursue “big-enough” market insights—ones based on changes in the marketplace that are certain to occur—and sure to shake up the competitive landscape

refuse to scale up for scale’s sake and actively manage the downsides of scale at every turn

The challenge is difficult. The research showed that companies that failed “were not illogical,” says Mr. Breene, the former chief strategy and corporate development officer of Accenture. “They acted reasonably. You can look at why the things they did each year seemed to be the strategically correct response at the time.”

Today and Tomorrow

High-performance businesses juggle the contradictory needs of the present and the future. “While the core part of the business might be working to eliminate failure and error, you have to have parts of the business where intelligent failure is accepted. Failure allows you to get insights and innovations and breakthroughs,” Mr. Breene says.

High performers fix what doesn’t seem to be broken yet. The ride up the S-curve can be exhilarating, but high performers don’t just revel in the success. They use it to prepare for their next act, and they actively manage the cresting of their S-curves.

Companies can try to predict when they will reach the revenue peak on their current S-curve by gauging and forecasting market saturation. But there’s always the danger that disruption will strike—a competitor unveils a new product, or technology makes a leap forward—and the curve’s life will be shortened.

Incremental innovations are useful for extending an S-curve and bringing in revenue to fund the next S, but high performers are “remarkably committed to breakthrough innovation,” Mr. Breene says. “They have market-changing ambition. They look farther out. They are happy working on seven-to-10-year time frames.”

High-performance businesses take a long-term view for talent, too. They understand that it’s not enough to “optimize” the workforce. That’s why they turn themselves into hothouses of talent, where they can give people room to grow. They glean insights from employees at all levels and they give them stretch assignments to learn new skills.

“High performers have much deeper planning and talent-management systems,” says Mr. Nunes, the executive director of research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance.

UPS has long been a “hothouse.” For example, it has a tradition of promoting people from within, says Kurt Kuehn, chief financial officer at the Atlanta-based logistics company who himself started as a holiday-season driver more than 30 years ago. “Because we do focus so much on employees as lifetime assets, we have this incredible residual base of talented people”—what Mr. Nunes and Mr. Breene refer to as a “talent surplus.”

A talent surplus makes a company blossom with innovation and creativity. Employees are not just responding to the challenges of the moment but are thinking about how the company can do something better or new.

“As we create a new S-curve, we need an infusion of new talent,” says Mr. Kuehn. “We mix maybe two parts old skills and one part new skills.”

High-performance businesses like UPS become magnets for “serious talent.”

New Strategy—New Leadership

High performers also constantly groom and challenge the upper ranks to prepare new teams to take over when new strategies require. That means not just the CEO but the entire C-suite.

“In order for the company to evolve ahead of the curve, the top team has to evolve first,” Mr. Nunes says.

UPS has transformed itself through many S-curves. Founded in 1907 as a messenger service in Seattle, it began serving more kinds of businesses, then spread geographically, then added air services, international deliveries and logistics.

UPS’s chief executives have had tenures in the four-to-seven-year range—close to the typical S-curve cycle. There’s no bell that rings when a CEO’s time is up, but since the company’s CEO comes from within, he already has been implementing his vision and strategy even before taking the helm, according to Mr. Kuehn.

Early but Not Too

While high-performance businesses think big, they aren’t always first with an idea. Zenith successfully moved from one S-curve—in radio—to another—in TV—but stumbled as it focused on high-definition TV in the 1980s, well ahead of the market.

By contrast, Porsche of Germany was far from first to market a sport-utility vehicle. Porsche tailored its Cayenne to its customer base, offering a unique SUV, rather than a me-too vehicle. It gained traction gradually—the 911 sports car line remained the best-seller during the Cayenne’s first year. Eventually the Cayenne became the company’s top seller—Porsche took its time to get everything right before scaling up.

The secret at the core of high-performance businesses’ successful market moves, however, is something the authors call a “big-enough market insight,” or BEMI. High performers put wind in the sails of their strategies by moving in alignment with a major market shift. Zenith’s insight was perhaps too big and too soon. Porsche’s insight was recognizing that demographic shifts meant growing demand for SUVs was more than a fad, and that a portion of that fast-growing market would favor a company that could deliver in an SUV everything a sports car lover would want.

High-performance businesses go to extraordinary lengths to understand their customers. Procter & Gamble even sends researchers to live with customers to observe how they use products and to reveal unmet needs.

While tending to core businesses, high performers also prepare for their next S-curve with an “edge-centric” strategy. That is, they pick up insights from looking at the periphery of market evolution and customer demand, often by keeping better tabs on what is happening on the periphery of their own organization.

“While it can look like you’re taking your eye off the ball, moving off into uncharted territory, actually you’re keeping your eye on the ball by searching where the best ideas are most likely to be found,” says Mr. Nunes.

Accenture’s Mr. Nunes and Mr. Breene also point out that size doesn’t correlate with success. In picking out companies that maintained high performance over the long term, they noticed that the winners were often midsize contenders in their fields.

“As you scale, it gets more difficult to sustain the characteristics of high performance,” Mr. Breene explains. “You get more complexity and that leads to a tendency toward process, policy and rules. The emphasis shifts toward incremental innovation. The vitality that made the business great in the first place begins to die as it becomes more like a machine and less like a living organism.”

Adds Mr. Nunes: “Everybody wants growth, but scaling, size and complexity tend to drive out headroom. You need headroom to jump the S-curve.”